Life is Safer

       Might I suggest that we briefly interrupt our horror at what the Trump-Musk gang is doing to our country to focus on one undeniably good thing that has happened over the course of our lifetimes.

       Life has continued to grow safer.

       Yes, you can still be hit by a car or fall victim to a pandemic.

       And the bellicose, neo-fascist alliance-smashers now at the helm of the ship of state—and their anti-science cronies—may very well succeed in reversing some of the progress I am about to recount.

      But that progress has been real.

      I have made use of GPT-4o to locate most of the statistics with which I want to demonstrate that.

      Auto Accidents

      I was reminded of one of the ways things have improved last week when it fell to me to steer a car through significant portions of the length and breadth of Costa Rica. The vast majority of the roads that was accomplished on—mostly major north-south or east-west arteries—offered only two lanes.

      And the lane going my way was often occupied by vehicles—old trucks and even some tractors—that tended to go significantly slower than I wanted to go, clogging those arteries.

      So it was necessary to pass.

      You remember the drill. You wait for a straight stretch, peek out into the other lane and then—on the infrequent occasions when nothing seems to be coming—turn into the other lane, floor it and then scoot back.

      It works fine most of the time. But sometimes it doesn’t. Somewhere between 16 to 20 people per 100,000 population die each year in auto accidents in Costa Rica.

       Things were worse in the United States when I was young. The death rate from automobile accidents often exceeded 20 per 100,000 in the US back in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, I was a passenger in three cars that were hit by or hit other cars by the age of 18. In one people, not me, were hurt.

      Which is why I am pleased that major highways with only two-lanes are not that common in modern America: Thank you Dwight Eisenhower! The Interstate Highway System not only made traveling by car faster it made it safer. I have not experienced a significant auto accident since those childhood crashes.

      Not only have roads gotten safer—highways have four (or more) lanes, guard rails, lights, reflectors, etc. Not only have cars gotten much safer, with airbags, etc. But people have finally learned how to operate their overpowered chariots more or less safely. We were, after all, the first “driver’s ed” generation.

      Deaths from auto accidents in the United States have hovered around 12 to 13 per 100,000 population recently. (And automobiles likely will get much safer when we allow AI to drive our cars not just calculate their best route.)

      Plus modern-day vehicles (including my cheap, little rental car in Costa Rica) themselves are now overloaded with safety devices all nowhere to be found in our even seatbelt-less youth—from airbags to little red lights that flash inside mirrors to warn you not to change lanes.

      Cars, of course, pollute. But so, so much less than they once did. According to the Environmental Protection Agency combined emissions of carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter decreased in the United States 77 percent between 1970 and 2020.

      Whether you like the lifestyle automobiles and Interstates contribute to is a different question. Certainly—outside of Manhattan—that has conclusively become the US lifestyle. And, at least, driving in cars has become much, much safer.

      Atomic Weapons

      Perhaps the most haunting threat most of us felt in our youths was the Strangelovian threat: another Hiroshima.

     There are now, alas, lots more nuclear bombs in the world held by lots more countries—responsible and not. Yet somehow, after Nagasaki, another one has not been exploded in anger and that fear has dissipated. The world’s leaders—good and bad—seem surprisingly, uncharacteristically responsible when it comes to The Bomb.

      No one any longer feels the need for a fallout shelter.

      (Knock on wood.)

      Disease

      Polio was conquered by a couple of vaccines just when we might have been most vulnerable to it. And other diseases have succumbed too—although anti-vaccine crazies are currently allowing Measles to sneak back.

      HIV/AIDS began slaughtering people and—thanks to cocktails of three strong anti-viral drugs—to a large extent stopped slaughtering people in the United States between 1981 and the end of the 20th century. In between, however, hundreds of thousands of people died in the United States—most of them gay men.

      The recent and deadly COVID pandemic killed more than a million people in the United States early in this decade and proved that humans remain vulnerable to genetic mutations among viruses in bat caves somewhere—or lab leaks. But let’s hope it also proved that humans can now respond rather quickly to new viruses with new vaccines.

      Certainly, there seems to have been significant medical progress in our lifetimes.

      In the 1960s about 200 people per 100,000 died of cancer each year. More recently it has been 150 to 160 per 100,000.

      In the 1960s, there were 300 to 400 deaths per 100,000 from heart attacks. My uncle had a major heart attack in his 50s, my grandfather in his 60s. My father died of a heart attack at the age of 72. I take a statin. I’m 75 and still riding my bike. By the 2020s the death rate from heart attacks in the United States had declined to about 150 to 180 per hundred thousand.

      Fitness, diet and the decline in smoking no doubt have helped. Heart attacks remain among the major threats we face, but it is now half as bad a threat.

       And yeah, it’s scary-weird how many pills older Americans take each day. But they seem to have helped.

     Airplane crashes

      In the 1960s there were an average of about 1.5 fatalities for every million miles flown in the United States. That number has dropped all the way to .07 fatalities per million miles flown today. I don’t believe the recent crashes in Washington and Toronto will change the fact that air travel has become among the safest forms of travel.

      However, maintaining that safety record might depend on the layoff-crazy Trump administration keeping the air-traffic-control systems reasonably well staffed.

      Wars

      GPT-4o concludes that from 1940 to 1950 between 70 and 85 million people died in wars and major civil conflicts—including, of course, World War II and, in particular, the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It—the decade right before I was born—may qualify as the worst decade for humankind—ever. (About 16 million had died in the First World War three decades earlier.)

     GPT-4o estimates between 3 and 7 million such war deaths each decade in the second half of the 20th century.

      But it concludes that there were only (only?) 1.5 to 2 million such deaths in wars and major civil conflicts in the first decade of this century and about 1.5 million in the second, from 2010 to 2020.

     Still awful, disgusting, outrageous.

     But better.

Less war.

     Murder

      Crime is a threat to our safety that increased for a while in our lifetimes in the United States. In the early 1960s the murder rate was only 5 per 100,000 people.

      I once heard Pete Hamill, one of the great chroniclers of New York City, describe life on one block of the East Village in the 1960s, when it seemed, in his recounting, filled with a wide variety of people disposed to help each other out—including, and this detail has stuck with me, a guitar player, named Jimi, whose licks could often be heard wafting through a window on an upper floor.

      That block changed, Hamill noted, early in the next decade as heroin and a desperate need for money to buy it became common. The second detail he mentioned that stuck with me concerned a young delivery man, in that same once-sweet neighborhood, getting mugged for his cash.

      I drove a taxi in New York City in the early 1970s—it was right before they first started separating the passengers from the drivers with thick plexiglass. By 1979 the murder rate in the United States had reached about 7.9 per 100,000 people.

      The heroin epidemic was followed by a crack-cocaine epidemic. And the murder rate nationally in the United States reached about 10 per 100,000 in the 1980s and stayed there into the early 1990s. But then it began to decline. By 2019 it had fallen—despite the arrival of Fentanyl—to 1960s levels: 5 per 100,000.

      The murder rate went up some during COVID—to 6.9 per 100,000. But it has not returned to 1980s and 1990s levels. And it appears to have dropped in 2024.

       Mass shootings have become a relatively new, terrifying and seemingly frequent occurrence in the United States. But deaths from mass shootings are included in these murder numbers.

       The numbers of children or young adults killed in mass shootings at schools, colleges and universities—particularly horrifying events—are outrageously, unconscionably large: GPT-4o estimates that between 350 and 400 students had been killed in mass shootings at schools in the United States in this century by 2023. But those numbers are not large enough to have much of an effect on total murder numbers.

      The United States continues to have many, many too many murders, in large part because it has many, many too many guns. But there has been no lasting uptick in murders in recent years.

      Climate Related Deaths

      The numbers, so far, have not been large—at least in the United States.

      Weather related events—droughts, flooding, severe storms, wildfires and winter storms killed 568 people in the United States in 2024. Some of these events certainly might be blamed on climate change.

      The hugely destructive Los Angeles fires earlier this year—pretty clearly attributable to climate change—killed 29 people.

      Undoubtedly, the worst is yet to come. Certainly, we must work to reduce global warming.

* * *

     Of course, those reading these statistics at my age may not find them all that reassuring. For GPT-4o also reports that the average 75-year-old woman in the United States can expect to live on average only about 12.9 more years, and a 75-year-old man only 11.1 more years.      

     Our lives have gotten safer. But we remain mortal and fragile creatures.

Mitchell Stephens, one of the editors of this site, is the author of nine books, including the rise of the image the fall of the word, A History of News, Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World, Beyond News: The Future of Journalism, and The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th Century Journalism. He is a professor emeritus of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University, lives in New York City and spends a lot of time traveling and experimenting with video.